• ANTONIO LUCAS

  • PHOTOGRAPHY: JOSÉ AYMÁ

Updated Tuesday,9May2023-02:58

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  • Morante de la Puebla, after the milestone of Seville: "I do not want or pretend to be a myth"
  • Two ears and tail, Puerta del Príncipe: Morante climbs to the top of history with an afternoon of legend in Seville

What happens in a bullring is an extension without rule of what happens in life. The unforeseen, the violence, the balance, the movement, the chance, the ill-fated, the beautiful, the without why. Too many times bullfighting is seen as frivolous, what does not matter, the noise and trembling of party, and nothingness. But in truth there is something else in this art. Something that happens without expecting it and its equivalence is the unique work, the fullness of the unrepeatable. Sometimes it ignites the unusual – almost never – but when it arrives there is no reason that encompasses such deep bewilderment.

José Antonio Morante Camacho, Morante de la Puebla, is the reason and the cause of the authenticity of bullfighting in this dark time. No one like him is a crew member on the artists' ship. No one else is in that remote galaxy or comes down to the dawn with rumor of holy advent. His is enigma bullfighting loaded with a dark water. His art dispenses genius, but does not require perfection.

It was that same thing that happened on April 26 in La Maestranza, the afternoon of the two ears and tail half a century after Ruiz Miguel did it for the last time. Joselito El Gallo inaugurated the twentieth century (it was 1919) in the same place with the same trophies. Morante opens the XXI in his own way. Morante de la Puebla is the timeless time of bullfighting.

He could have been born 100 years ago or he could come into the world in another 100 years. He belongs to the lineage of an authenticity that drips slowly and is able to draw a veronica that rocks in such a happy mistime that one could throw the afternoon inside. There is in his bullfighting an emotion that is not guilty. Perhaps primitive, unjustified, but never guilty. There is an unexpected beauty that only happens in his bullfighting, in the very different way of feeling it. A kind of symphony that has not sounded before and that is elusive, almost secret. It has something of being unpredictable entrusted to the miracle. A baroque by destiny. "I am a bullfighter who moves by inner drives. I am always looking for myself. Many times I live in thought." Living in thought gives the telluric dimension of this bullfighter and his grammar. To live in thought, in his case, is to live flying over the abyss, the fear, the inexplicable. Talk about him to him. In the midst of its geometric silences you can hear birds passing by all afternoon.

He is a bullfighter so gifted for the not yet said that in a remove can be his own substance and also the opposite. That's exactly why we like it so much. Morante is of the lineage of the rare. It has the substance of those sidereal weirds that the symbolist Paul Verlaine put together in a book entitled The Weird. Like those recovered later, in another volume of the same title, by the giant Rubén Darío. He accumulates a strange biography where art coexists with some gusts of hell. He carries his heart inside a broken alcuza. He sat on the psychiatrist's couch sparking with a broken existentialism. He was then traveling on the iceberg of an unremitting sadness that ruined his spirits. First he visited a specialist in Miami, then others here and there, looking under the bowler hat for that cold gadfly, the key to some damage. Morante can't be fully explained. He spends his own and stubborn plastic nature capable of driving the impossible mad in a square. Sometimes his bullfighting is a broken poem and sometimes he delivers with an unbeatable sweetness his tormented soul in a veronica so pure that it has no form or in the form it fits.

But there is more: the natives of Morante, when they occur with the slowness with which he loads the fabric, would allow a swallow of Las Ventas to make a nest in the box rack. And so on. Right now there is no bullfighter with more intolerance to vulgarity. If he fails, he also does it like fucking angels. And if an afternoon goes well, it is one of those that leave an entrance and exit hole in the fans who know how to see it.

He has made elegance a way of being, dandyism something more than a good and aceric tailor's cloth: an identity, a music, a satanism. He knows how to wear the lit cigar and the top hat. He understands bullfighting as a theology that breaks the mentality of a shabby and narrow part of today's bullfighting. "A bullfighter is not differentiated by putting himself in front of a bull, but by having bullfighting, which is something deeper, a concept. That's the only way to create beauty in a square. Because what moves me is beauty. I like the old expression of ancient bullfighting, that straight rhythm. Art is born of naturalness, of the spontaneous, of truth. And today everything is very ready." He told me this years ago in Seville, almost as a premonition of what is now, of what one day had to happen.

It is made of another paste: tragic, torn, overwhelming. It has been installed in the legend and in that height there is no foresight, but an arithmetic without guarantees is accepted that goes from magic to purity, always driven by irregularity. Inside he is patrolled by an anomaly where the four corners of the loss collide.

He has, like Rafael de Paula, a face and a cross, sometimes difficult to distinguish, but when everything began to go worse in his craft – the pandemic put bullfighting to the limit and it will never be the same again – he threw the fairs on his shoulder and assumed the responsibility of not taking the step back to save the wreck of an increasingly suffocated expression of art, more off-site. In that, too, it is different.

Morante is about to do the paseíllo in Las Ventas. Return to Madrid. Bullfighting (or whatever that was) is like he did the other afternoon in Seville. Almost a poltergeist.

MORANTE'S AFTERNOONS AT THE SAN ISIDRO FAIR 2023

Thursday, May 11. Bulls of Garcigrande for Morante de la Puebla, Emilio de Justo and Tomás Rufo.

Thursday, May 18. Bulls of Alcurrucén for Morante de la Puebla, El Juli and Tomás Rufo.

Friday, June 2. Bulls of El Torero for Uceda Leal, Morante de la Puebla and Sebastián Castella.

Tickets to see Morante de la Puebla at the San Isidro Fair can be purchased here.

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